by Ian Morris
Figure 5.8. The shape of unknown unknowns: the wild rides of the world’s economies, 1913–39 (Soviet figures are unreliable before 1928)
The United States, on the other hand, supported its mega-fleet while spending just 1 percent of GDP on defense, because American output surged steadily upward in the 1920s while other economies struggled through boom-and-bust cycles. By 1929 American foreign investment had almost matched Britain’s peak level of 1913, and its global trade was worth 50 percent more. “The change since 1914 in the international position of the United States,” the New York Times’ financial editor noted in 1926, was “perhaps the most dramatic transformation of economic history.”
The United States seemed ready to drive Britain out of its job as globocop, but this was the last thing on most Americans’ minds. Some adhered to Thomas Jefferson’s hope for “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none”; others worried more about avoiding entangling expenses; but others still, including President Woodrow Wilson, dreamed of something completely different.
The goal of fighting, Wilson told the Senate in January 1917, must be “peace without victory,” because “victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished.” As Wilson saw it, “only a peace between equals can last,” meaning that “the guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor imply a difference between big nations and small, between those that are powerful and those that are weak.” In place of one mighty empire acting as globocop, Wilson proposed a league of nations, “a single and overwhelming powerful group of nations who shall be the trustee of peace in the world.”
On the face of it, this did not look so new. Kant, of course, had talked about something similar, and just a few years before Wilson’s speech the former president Theodore Roosevelt had suggested replacing the old-fashioned globocop with a kind of community globocop, in which “the efficient civilized nations—those that are efficient in war as well as in peace—shall join in a world league for the peace of righteousness … to act with the combined military strength of all of them against any recalcitrant nation.” Some even imagined an international air force that would bomb aggressors to the negotiating table.
But when the League of Nations took shape in 1919, it looked nothing like this. It had no coercive powers. Its achievements in bringing refugees home, stabilizing currencies, and gathering statistics were extraordinary, but it could not fill the vacuum left by the British globocop. Many critics suspected that not competing with Britain was in fact the whole point of the exercise; after all, they observed, when Lloyd George declared, “I am for a league of nations,” he had added, “In fact … the British Empire is a league of nations.” The league’s constitution was based largely on British proposals, and one of its first acts was to approve British and French “mandates”—in effect, colonies—in much of the Arab world.
The U.S. Congress wanted nothing to do with it, seeing it as just one more entangling alliance; Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s future prime minister, wrote from a British jail that “the League of Nations … looks forward to a permanent dominance by these Powers over their empires”; and Lenin denounced it as a “stinking corpse” and “an alliance of world bandits.” The only real alternative to a globocop, the Soviets announced in 1919, was communism itself, which would “destroy the rule of capital, make war impossible, abolish state frontiers, [and] change the entire world into one cooperative community.”
The problem with the communist solution, however, was that the Bolsheviks had been killing from the moment they seized power, and seemed to relish it. “Comrade!” Lenin wrote to one commissar in August 1918. “Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks [prosperous peasants], rich men, bloodsuckers … Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry: they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks …
“Yours, Lenin.
“P.S. Find tougher people.”
In March 1919, when Lenin called the League of Nations a stinking corpse, more than five million men were fighting a particularly horrible civil war in the new Soviet Union. This ultimately killed even more Russians (perhaps eight million, counting deaths from famine and disease) than the Germans had done. Britain and France had decided as early as May 1918 that they had to intervene, and serious fighting began on November 11, the very day that quiet fell on the Western Front. In 1919 a quarter of a million foreign troops (mostly British, Czech, Japanese, French, and American, but including Polish, Indian, Australian, Canadian, Estonian, Romanian, Serbian, Italian, Greek, and even Chinese contingents) served on Russian soil.
If the league really had been a capitalist conspiracy, Lenin and his henchmen would not have lasted long enough to condemn it. But as it was, with no globocop overseeing operations, the interventions in the Russian Civil War broke down in disorder. By mid-1920, all forces but the Japanese had withdrawn, and Soviet armies were bearing down on Warsaw. After gobbling up Poland, the Soviets planned to carry communism to Germany, which had just finished putting down its own Bolshevik revolution. For a few weeks in the summer of 1920 it looked as if Lenin’s boast that the red flag would sweep away state frontiers might actually come true, but as the Red Army outran its supplies, the Poles rallied and hurled it back. At the end of August, Polish horsemen even won Europe’s last big cavalry battle, at Komarów. Twenty-five thousand men charged and countercharged, sabers drawn, much as mounted warriors had been doing for the previous two thousand years, but this time they did it with machine guns clattering and high explosive shells bursting all around them.
Over the next few years, the Soviets quietly dropped their talk of world revolution. Sporadic fighting continued over the carcasses of the empires cast down by World War I, but for a while at least, the world seemed to be getting along just fine without a globocop. International trade recovered, and by 1924 incomes in most places were back where they had been in 1914. The world was finally putting the horrors of the war behind it. Between 1921 and 1927, the Dow Jones index of American stocks quadrupled; between 1927 and 1929 it almost doubled again, peaking at 381.17 points on September 3, 1929.
Ten years later to the day, Britain and France once again declared war on Germany.
Death of a Globocop
The nineteenth-century world-system finally died over the last weekend of October 1929.
Despite eighty-five years of arguments, we still don’t know exactly how it started. “The 1929 crisis is a substantial curiosity,” says the financial historian Harold James, “in that it was a major event, with truly world-historical consequences (the Great Depression, even perhaps the Second World War), but no obvious causes.” For whatever reason, Wall Street traders lost their heads on Wednesday, October 23. Four billion dollars of wealth (the equivalent of $53 billion today) evaporated. By Thursday lunchtime, another $9 billion of American riches had evaporated. Then the markets rallied, buoyed by an alliance of bankers buying up the shares no one wanted, but on Monday the roof really fell in. By Tuesday afternoon the Dow had lost almost a quarter of its value, and by the summer of 1932 a dollar of stock bought at the market’s peak on September 3, 1929, was worth just eleven cents.
The decade between September 3, 1929, and September 3, 1939, saw global finance melt down, sweeping away what was left of the integration that had made the nineteenth-century world-system work. Into the 1870s and even beyond, Britain had regularly acted as the lender of last resort, accepting that being a globo-credit union was part of the globocop’s job. But now there was no globocop; it was every government for itself. One after another, they walled off their economies, raising barriers against competition and financial contagion. The United States alone introduced twenty-one thousand tariffs to keep out imports, and by the end of 1932 international trade had shrunk to one-third of what it had been in 1929.
It was this that killed Britain’s last pretensions to playing globocop. Like everyo
ne else, governments in London retreated behind tariffs. Defense spending fell even further, and in 1932 the chiefs of staff admitted that the navy could no longer defend the empire east of Suez. War, they conceded, would “expose to depredation, for an inestimable period, British possessions and dependencies, including those of India, Australia and New Zealand.”
Not surprisingly, the possessions and dependencies being so exposed reacted badly. The white settler dominions made it clear that London should not take their support for granted if another war came, and India, for so long a central pillar in the world-system, began going its own way. Britain opened negotiations with Gandhi’s noncooperation movement in 1930, and in 1935 it made major concessions to Indian political parties.
The 1930s collapse shook the British ruling class to its core. “It is the virtue of the Englishman,” a Cambridge don had written in 1913, “that he never doubts,” but over the next twenty years this certainty faded fast. Even to its rulers, the whole globocop exercise was starting to seem just a little bit pointless. The most eloquent doubter was surely George Orwell, an Old Etonian whose five-year stint in the empire’s police force in Burma turned him into one of Britannia’s fiercest critics. However, he was hardly alone. “All over India,” he observed, “there are Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are a part.” Once, he wrote, he had shared a compartment on an overnight train ride with an (English) officer of the Indian Education Service. “It was too hot to sleep,” he said, “and we spent the night in talking.”
Half an hour’s cautious questioning decided each of us that the other was “safe”; and then for hours, while the train jolted slowly through the pitch-black night, sitting up in our bunks with bottles of beer handy, we damned the British Empire—damned it from the inside, intelligently and intimately. It did us both good. But … when the train crawled into Mandalay, we parted as guiltily as any adulterous couple.
The empire still had its boosters, of course. “There are Englishmen who reproach themselves with having governed [India] badly,” one of these admirers wrote. “Why? Because the Indians show no enthusiasm for their rule. I claim that the English have governed India very well, but their error is to expect enthusiasm from the people they administer.”
This fan was Adolf Hitler. The solution to the world’s uncertainties, he insisted, was force, not self-doubt, and as the democracies of the 1930s struggled with sluggish growth, faction-ridden ruling coalitions, unemployment, and social unrest, it began to look as if he might be right. Violent strongmen (some on the left, but most on the right) seized power in Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. All made the same bet: that without a globocop, force was the solution to their problems.
In many ways, the Soviet Union was the model for them all. Its leaders seemed to have discovered the secret of success in the uncertain postwar world: that more violence worked better than less violence. Stalin shot tens of thousands of his subjects, locked a million in gulags, shipped millions more around his empire, and confiscated so much grain that ten million starved, and as he did so, the closed, inward-turned, centrally planned Soviet economy grew by 80 percent between 1929 and 1939. This dwarfed the performance of the open-access, globally linked, capitalist economies. Britain expanded by a respectable 20 percent across the same decade, but France managed only 3 percent, and the United States just 2 percent.
Cheered by the success of internally directed violence, and undeterred by the fact that he had just had all the best officers in the Red Army shot, Stalin turned violence outward in 1939. He sent troops into Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, and Manchuria, and on the last of these fronts the Soviets clashed with an equally aggressive Japan, which, after prospering as a commercial power since the 1870s, had been hard-hit by the new barriers to trade in the 1930s. “Our nation seems to be at a dead-lock,” Lieutenant Colonel Ishiwara Kanji observed, “and there appears to be no solution for the important problems of population and food”—unless, that is, Japan adopted Ishiwara’s solution: “the development of Manchuria and Mongolia [whose] natural resources will be sufficient to save [Japan] from the imminent crisis” (Figure 5.9).
Figure 5.9. End of empire: the wars for Asia, 1931–83
Ishiwara and a gaggle of junior officers went rogue, invading Manchuria (then part of China) in 1931 without any orders to do so. Ishiwara half expected to be court-martialed, but when it became clear that the invasion was going well and that there was no invisible fist to punish them, politicians in Tokyo—themselves drowning in unknown unknowns—also embraced force. When the League of Nations insisted that they withdraw, they instead withdrew from the league.
British and American politicians fulminated but did nothing. A Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1932 did shock Britain into dropping the budgeting assumption (in place since 1919) that it would not have to fight a major war within the next decade, but still Britain hesitated to rearm, largely out of fear of stoking inflation.
Five years later, Japan struck again, overrunning northern China. Once more, violence paid. With newly conquered markets to sell in and burgeoning armies to provision, Japan saw its GDP grow more than 70 percent in the 1930s. “We really got busy,” one munitions worker remembered. “By the end of 1937, everybody in the country was working. For the first time, I was able to take care of my father. War’s not bad at all, I thought” (Figure 5.10).
Figure 5.10. “War’s not bad at all”: burned children in Shanghai’s bombed-out railway station, 1937
Japan outdid the Soviets at externally directed violence. After storming Nanjing in southern China in December 1937, Japanese soldiers raped and murdered perhaps a quarter of a million people. “We took turns raping them,” one soldier confessed. “It would be all right if we only raped them. I shouldn’t say all right. But we always stabbed and killed them.” When a Tokyo journalist recoiled at seeing men hanging by their tongues from hooks, an officer explained things to him. “You and I have diametrically different views of the Chinese. You may be dealing with them as human beings, but I regard them as swine. We can do anything to such creatures.”
Back in 1904, when Halford Mackinder predicted that the struggle between the inner rim, the outer rim, and the heartland would dominate the twentieth century, he was already worrying that Japan might follow a path like the one Ishiwara recommended. “Were the Chinese,” he speculated, “organized by the Japanese, to overthrow the Russian Empire and conquer its territory, they might constitute the yellow peril to the world’s freedom just because they would add an oceanic frontage to the resources of the great continent, an advantage as yet denied to the Russian tenant of the pivot region.”
When Mackinder was delivering his famous lecture in 1904, Japan was pressing from the outer into the inner rim, fighting Russia for access to Manchuria, but thirty-five years later Manchuria was completely under its control. There was no immediate danger of Japan’s invading the heartland, and a tough, undeclared war with Stalin in the summer of 1939 saw Soviet tanks inflict a sharp defeat on the Japanese at Nomonhan. But the conquest of coastal China—to Mackinder, the prerequisite for conquering the heartland—was moving ahead. Japan seemed to be working from Mackinder’s script: by taking over Manchuria and China, Ishiwara announced, “the Japanese people can become rulers of Asia and be prepared to wage the final and decisive war against the various white races.”
All this was alarming—very alarming—but what worried defenders of the status quo most was, once again, Germany. The Versailles settlement had created a buffer zone of small states in eastern Europe, but Germany’s strategic problem (and opportunities) had not gone away. It was still sandwiched between the Russian heartland and the Franco-British outer rim, and violence seemed as plausible a policy in the 1930s as it had been in the 1910s.
Back in 1917, the kaiser had compared Europe with the ancient Mediterranean. Because Rome’s victory over Carthage in the First Punic War of 264–241 B.C. had failed to resolve the two powers’ real issues, he observed, a more terribl
e—but also more decisive—Second Punic War had to be fought twenty years later. Germany too, he predicted, would have to fight a Second Punic War. All it needed was a Hannibal—and in 1933 it got one.
The Tempest
“Germany’s problem,” Hitler told his advisers in 1937, “could be solved only by the use of force.” This, he argued as early as 1925 in his book Mein Kampf, meant that Germany had to refight the First World War, and this time get it right.
Germany’s 1914 strategy, Hitler thought, had been basically correct, and in the war to come, the army would once again strike west while marking time in the east. After overthrowing the outer-rim powers of France and Britain, Germany would turn on the Soviet Union. At that point, though, Hitler went beyond the thinking of the 1910s. In 1917, Ludendorff had insisted that anywhere that Germans lived, from the Rhine to the Volga, was part of a “Greater Germany,” but Hitler imagined what the historian Niall Ferguson calls a “Greatest Possible Germany,” where only Germans lived. This would give the German race Lebensraum, or “living space,” where sturdy Teutonic farmers would go forth and multiply free from the taint of lesser races.
Success, Hitler said, depended on learning two great lessons from World War I and then going beyond them. The first came originally from British officers, who, in 1918, had seen that combining German storm-troop tactics with their own style of massed tank attacks and (insofar as the technology of the day allowed it) close air support could make trench warfare obsolete. The idea, the maverick military theorist Captain Basil Liddell Hart explained, was to make the fight more fluid, with success coming “above all in the ‘follow-through’—the way that a break-through … is exploited by a deep strategic penetration; carried out by armoured forces racing on ahead of the main army, and operating independently.”